A PICTORIAL DEVICE:
THE DYNAMIC ACTION OF WATER IN A FEW DEPICTIONS OF RAIN ANIMALS
Renaud Ego

Outline of a corpus

In several panels on the Brandberg, however, the presence of water flows should not be taken as accidental, especially as they cross or border the depiction of creatures which are one of the bodies given to the rain.

• In shelter No. 28 of Ga'aseb, the snake's head and tail were drawn in the water flow (illustrated by Pager 199

• The great serpent that gives its name to the shelter of Snake Rock links two abundant water flows; moreover, its body is partially erased in several places by flows of lesser extent (illustrated by Pager 1993: 45)

• In the middle of Amis valley, another shelter is decorated with two snakes one of which, again, is emerging from a water flow and also heading towards it, the extremity of its head having even been partially erased by the effect of the running water.

• In the western part of Amis valley, a curled-up snake (which, uncoiled, would measure almost 4 metres) is partially painted in a water flow.

• Not far from there, a black giraffe, with a delicately depicted coat, seems to be emerging from a water flow.

• In Hungorob 7, there is a sizeable painting heavily damaged by a water flow cutting right through the main motif. Amid a large geometric motif is a faded image of an eared snake with a grid pattern and some streamers emanating below, probably representing rain (illustrated by Pager 1993: 83).

There are other depictions of big snakes bathed by several rain-flows. Shelter 16 in the Eros valley is thus decorated with an eared snake of almost 4 metres in length, below which are several animal images including one depicting a giraffe and another representing a rhinoceros. "The head and front part of this serpent are painted high up on the centre part of the inclined wall, then there is a spacey gap of well over 1 m which is completely washed away, while the tail end, preserved only in spots, extends over the front entrance of the site", writes Tilman Lenssen-Erz in his comments on this shelter (Pager 1995: 210).

This purposeful arrangement confers an unprecedented status on these paintings. The images here are not simple representations. They participate in a pictorial device whose symbolic functioning is based on the combination and relationship of an iconographic motif and the element of which it is one of the symbols. How can one analyse this?

Water in some other rock art traditions

A few brief glances at other parietal traditions, while by no means having the value of a systematic inventory, have convinced me that the role of water has not been analysed as an active agent in paintings or engravings. Few remarks have been written, here and there, for other traditions of rock art. In the Sahara, for example, Léonce Joleaud pointed out long ago that water rites were one of the themes in the engravings. Later, it was established that the spiral motifs which were frequent in these engravings were a sign of fertility, but in both cases the relationship remained one of a theme and its simple pictorial illustration.

In France, Phillipe Hameau has noticed that since final Neolithic, Prehistoric people use shelters to draw schematic figures. Among the crieria that leaded to the choice of the shelter were the south orientation and humidity that flows inside the shelter. And finally he observes that these two parameters correspond the two most frequent signs of his corpus: the sun-like sign and the broken line.

Somewhat more pertinent is the remark made by Henri Hugot about a famous engraving of a cow at Terrarat, in the Tassili: "It is said", he wrote, "that, when the wadi is full, the cow seems to drink" (Hugot & Bruggmann 1999), an example that recalls the description of a hind that seems to drink the water flowing from a fissure in the cave of Altamira, or that of a large red deer in that of Niaux. In such instances, water could have been integrated into the composition in the same way as the qualities of volume or relief of the wall are incorporated so often - in the form of metonyms of landscapes (horizon lines) or of bodies (rocks in relief serving as bodies for two bison in Altamira, a natural rock shape depicting a horse profile at Pech-Merle, etc). And yet, one cannot rule out this was done for the purpose of some water rite.

Certainly, with regard to engravings in the Yemen, Michel-Alain Garcia and Madiha Rachad have observed that "some places were sought out because they were the location of intensive water flows in humid periods. Here one generally finds paintings depicting lines of bovines whose head and forequarters are periodically wetted by the water flows, which alas has caused their degradation. One also encounters engraved people whose whole body is washed in this way. Sometimes, whole scenes occupy the areas that are regularly inundated, which stand out lighter on the other panels. It is probably for this reason that the artists chose them" (Garcia & Rachid 1997:18). In these examples, water plays a full part in the life of the engraved figures. On the basis of this example and that of the engravings of Foz Côa in Portugal, Jean-Louis Schefer was able to claim with some conviction that "water not only preserves the figures but it feeds them periodically. It keeps them alive" (Schefer 1999:100).

This intuition is appealing, but is it not based on the immediate connotations associated with water? By bathing the images, water keeps them alive, or rather brings them the life of which it is more than a symbol: an essential condition. But in fact, the meaning of this pictorial device has to be sought in the functioning that is peculiar to it. What can one propose?

A pictorial device

The existence of rock art is based on the power that the images possess in the eyes of their creators and those who are its spectators. As an image, a work visually embodies the forces that the painters or engravers represent and/or appeal to. It is a system of visual communication. In the example of panels that integrate water into their construction, this analysis needs to be fine-tuned. We are no longer in the presence of paintings but of pictorial devices, in which one needs to analyse the flow from the angle of the presence of water and its action on the depicted motifs.

The figurative presence of the place

At the most elementary level, the trace of the flow can be considered as a metonym of the place where the rain animals live: the river, the water-holes, the clouds, or even those other worlds which the San imagined to be these creatures' territories. If the water flow is merely a representation of the rain animal's site of choice, then its integration into such a pictorial device is little different from that of the natural irregularities in the wall. Although simple, such an integration is nonetheless highly probable. Certainly, in all the examples presented here, the rain serpents are emerging from or heading for a water flow. Their relationship with the flow confers on the trace left by the water the pictorial value of a site.

The dynamic manifestation of time

Water also has an active, dynamic form. It is a flow. The flow opens the painting to its own transformation, and makes this work into more than a "simple" pictorial representation; it becomes a pictorial device open to the dynamic action of water. Through this, time is introduced (cf. Solomon 1998, who considers the 'mythic woman' motif in San art in similar terms, from a phenomenological point of view). The image is not longer that unchanging and timeless reflection, but a simulation of life that time transforms. Time adopts the cyclical form of the periodic bath, or that of historical time, the gradual destruction of the painted motif. Erasure and metamorphosis are its two faces - and in both of them, the image becomes animated.

In its periodic flow, water could be the active agent of a ritual - it is, in a way, the idea of a bath as outlined by Jean-Louis Schefer: water comes to revive and feed the rain animal. In this hypothesis, water intervenes as a simple substance bearing the qualities of life, and not as the epiphany of this living creature whose painting is, however, its evocation, if not its invocation. I find this distinction somewhat improbable, especially as it does not take into account the immediate effect of the flow on the painting - that is, its gradual erasure until it disappears. The idea of a bath which revives and feeds the rain animal thus comes up against the destruction of its image through the water's dynamic effect. And yet this concrete effect of the flow is at the very centre of such a pictorial device. It is its motif, or at least its motive, that is to say, what keeps it moving.

The most original aspect of this device is that of opening up the work of art to time, by including its own transformation within itself. Visually, the work is being worked. Such a transformation needs to be considered from the figurative viewpoint of animation, and from the point of view of the meaning of metamorphosis and erasure.

From the figurative viewpoint, we should recall that André Leroi-Gourhan saw animation as a synonym of the expression of time (Leroi-Gourhan 1992:260). Analysing the methods of animating a painting, he distinguished different figurative processes, that is, processes that were linked to drawing in the painting. Hence, the depiction of an animal running, or the coordination of movement between several figures. Animation, he wrote, "understood here as the translation of an action by an animated figure in a significant pose is the only process that enables one to take account of the passing of time" (ibid:353). In the example that concerns us here, water has to be considered as a non-figurative process of animation, which does not depict movement but simulates it and, through deterioration of the image's appearance, incorporates time into it.

From the viewpoint of the meaning of metamorphosis, one should recall that the capacity to change one's appearance, even one's body, is, in all San accounts, the sign of a creature's supernatural power. The rain, in its various incarnations, as in its ability to transform its victims (D. Bleek 1933a:299-300) is a field of power of this kind. The action of its flow on its own pictorial depictions comes to represent, in the work, its own power.

Solution of meaning

The processes that we can describe in these panels scarcely permits us to choose between the different meanings that they support. This uncertainty is not only caused by gaps in our knowledge. It is also part of the mechanism of this work - it is more effective to incorporate the possible polysemy of its meanings. The work, in rock art, rarely seems to be a precise illustration (the portrait of an individual animal, for example, or the depiction of a real scene). It is not orientated towards the visual memory of a reality, but rather projects thought into a world to which it lends a few appearances of reality. It is a screen onto which collective thought can be projected. There a collective thought can be relaunched, restarted, remain in contact with what is unknown or mysterious in it, and keeps it alive.

With a pictorial device that integrates the flow into its own symbolic and iconographic functioning, we are in the presence of a "solution of meaning", both from the technical viewpoint of the mechanism of fascination that the work offers our eyes, and from the chemical viewpoint of a precipitate of meaning. Water bathes and liquidates the image. Doubtless this contradictory double action is at the very heart of this pictorial device. On contact, water would liberate and take on the power contained in its effigy, until its erasure which perhaps commanded that a new panel should be painted in another water flow. This mechanism, apparently contradictory, has the ambivalence of the rain which is male and female, dangerous and fecund, feared and awaited. It has the ambivalence of !Khwa who embodies the rain but also that malevolent supernatural power which is associated with the transgression of the sexual taboos that accompany menstruation. Anne Solomon reminds us in this regard that "the waterhole in /Xam myths and stories is primarily a place of death and the home of the death-giver, !Khwa" (Solomon 1997:5). I do not claim that the pictorial device signifies this ambivalence, but I do observe that it is a perfect simulation of its duality. Through !Khwa, life and death are the obverse and reverse of the same figure, with origin and end coinciding in the action of water on the painting.

The example of the panels depicting rain animals must necessarily lead us to refute the idea, a priori, that the flowing of water and the destruction of images are an accidental circumstance. Beyond these few images, the role of water could now be re-evaluated for all the paintings exposed to the ambivalent action of its flow.

Acknowledgements

Thanks are owing to Dr. Paul Bahn for translating this article from French into English.

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